On Infrastructure

My travels thus far have been a whirlwind of a variety of places from remote corners of the world to dense urban centers. Now that I've had the time to slow down, I've find myself incredibly curious about the core elements and infrastructures central to all of these places. I've detailed three musings from New Zealand that I wanted to noodle on in writing: 

1. Homes: In New Zealand, we spent two and a half weeks living in a van. Our bed was a piece of plywood over the folded down seats in the back and our kitchen was a gas camping stove. While we were certainly operating on less of a budget than most of our campervan tourist peers, New Zealand has a robust campervan tourism industry and many phenomenal campsites. Some of these campsites housed permanent mobile homes, where residents surrounded their RVs with temporary structures and gardens. It made me wonder about what defines a home, if that definition varies from culture to culture, and what that means for the housing crises of now and the future. Is the dream of a picture perfect suburban home an American social construct or a result of the desires of the collective middle class American culture? Either way, can we rewrite that narrative to be more friendly to density? Is there another alternative sustainable path forward that does not require density? 

2. Water: Also, while we were there, New Zealand declared that the north island was experiencing a drought while south island was experiencing dramatic flooding that closed parts of the Milford sound. We would often stay at campsites on private farmland and the farmers would tell us how their water tanks we're empty and there was a waitlist on the government trucking in water tanks so they might run out. Is this the best solution we have to distribute water to farmland? How did ancient people do this effectively? My gut instinct says that the future of farmland is density to minimize the distance water has to travel (e.g. Vertical farming). Would farmers be able to transition to vertical farming with minimal support or is that a different skill set? Could their land be changed to remain productive (perhaps even in a way other than farming) while being more local and sustainable? Or does a sustainable future require taking farmland away from farmers to, for example, reforest? 

3. Human waste: in an eco-homestay on a farm, the toilets had a "pee catcher" to separate feces from urine. The feces was then used for fertiliser while the urine was disposed of. From a quick conversation with the owner, this was primarily done to minimize the smell in the outhouse. Are there ways we can similarly reuse human waste in urban environments? Could sewage facilities simply get connected as a collection stop in compost infrastructure? If not, what complicates it? Would it be worthwhile to split urine and feces collection in this ideal waste infrastructure? 

As you can tell from these little windows into the chaos that is my unemployed brain, I'm becoming increasingly interested in the infrastructure and systems that organize and operate our lives. If you have any book recommendations on the topic, I'd love to read them! Hopefully, I’ll add on to this blog post with some answers to these questions. 

On supply

I’ve been increasingly surprised by how few items I actually need. I’m currently down to one ~35L backpack and I am still purging unnecessary items from it (side-note: I’m not looking forward to returning home and having to go through all off the stuff I left in storage). This minimalist approach is in contrast to the sheer amount of stuff I see on a daily basis. We try to visit a market in each city we go to and I’m amazed by the  abundance. In South Korea, one market had probably enough cloths for tens of thousands of people piled in precarious towers. In Taiwan, there are huge bags of traditional folk ingredients that I mostly don’t recognize (one of the stalls we saw in Taipei had about 10 ~2mx1mx.5m bags of garlic sitting on the street). As we explore these markets, I’ve spent more time wondering how all this stuff got here and if it will ultimately be used.

This musing was further complicated when several giant bags of some of the Taiwanese mystery ingredients were certified by Intertek, a “British multinational assurance, inspection, product testing and certification company” (wikipedia). Why is a UK company certifying traditional Taiwanese ingredients? How was it doing quality assurance? Were these ingredients shipped through the UK and then to Taiwan? Where did they come from in the first place?

Jordan showed me a podcast episode featuring a professor that studies food networks and how suppliers get around quality assurance (e.g., something like selling basil leaves mixed with strawberry leaves to cut costs). This taught me that it would be a Herculean task to hunt down the data to understand the dynamics of these supply and distribution chains. But at it’s most basic, these particular bags of ingredients were being sold in Taipei, after being certified by a UK company, and likely being supplied by another organization. Who is the supplier? How is demand anticipated and communicated back to the supplier? Is it? Is anyone responsible for ensuring sustainable consumption?   

Of all of the many questions above, I find this last one most intriguing as, to me at least, it requires a need for nature to have rights within the economic system. Even if nature has document rights, someone needs to voice and exercise them.  

Palau seems to have found an interesting and effective system. In Palau, our guide told us that there is a two-system government - the regular republic government and an indigenous government system that, in theory, has something like a veto power over the republic government. Because the indigenous government places great value on the environment and it tends to be a local priority, Palau has passed several impressive environmental protection policies, including creating marine sanctuaries, banning reef toxic sunscreen, and eliminating exploitative foreign fishing contracts. Palauans involved with the indigenous government system also seem deeply interested in learning to make more informed decisions - our boat captain asked us about how RADAR works because the US military proposed a new RADAR development on the island and he wanted to better understand the technology before his community’s meeting with the chief(s?) about it. 

This system seems to work to help defend nature from overexploitation for Palau and its neighbor, Yap (where I was told the indigenous government is something akin to a formal judiciary body). Both benefit from small scope (island) and homogenous, strong, and environmentally conscious indigenous communities. I wonder how replicable this model of institutionalizing a voice focused on the environment and tradition is as a way to better protect nature. If so, I would imagine the most useful form of international aid would be  a more supportive role (e.g., empower local communities and provide specific information, resources, etc. when only requested by the community, like the approach described in Easterly’s White Man’s Burden). 

I’m curious to know if there are other successful systems where nature has some form of institutionalized power. Let me know your thoughts! 

On friendships and community

One of the leading Airbnb experience hosts in Kyoto was kind enough to get coffee with me. We began by discussing our love for Kyoto and how the city is changing due to an unprecedented increase in tourists. She said something which has been bouncing around in my head for the past couple of weeks. She described how she became an Airbnb experience host to build relationships with others from around the world and how she wishes more of her guests stayed in touch or even just sent her a simple update on how their time in Japan affected them (if it did). I understood the sentiment but wasn't surprised. Most people I know approach tourism transactionally - they pay to visit the place and then leave it behind, taking only pictures, memories, and memorabilia with them. It makes sense that a host on Airbnb, a platform dedicated to connecting travelers with locals, is interested in actual connections but often doesn't receive them from Western tourists (the majority of her clientele).

Diving deeper, we realized that this might be deeply intertwined with cultural differences. I described how in America, many of my friends had an incredibly difficult time making new friends in new cities. While people might be friendly, most are too busy to dedicate time to new friends and instead stay within their already formed circle of friends (which I'll be calling "tribes"). Any friends that were made tended to be new residents of the city as well. 

"That sounds lonely," she replied in shock. She then described what it is like for at least her Japanese community; when someone wants to travel or moves to a new city, they email their friends/ping their social networks and everyone chips in - someone knows someone who knows someone who lives there and can make the connection. That connection usually then grows into a friendship - how different! 

Now, these are probably different forms of friendship. But I think that tribes are fundamentally different in Japan. I think Americans are predominantly individualistic; people construct their own tribes, investing heavily in a small group of close friends and less in groups or communities. While difficult to form, close friends are uniquely wonderful, deep relationships. For a tangible example of this barrier-to-entry, I think the difficulty in joining tribes is, in part, leading to the epidemic of middle-aged male loneliness where men invest solely in their spouses, then separate and have no remaining close connections and are struggling to make new ones (fascinating podcast here: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/594719471). 

In Japan, I'd hypothesize almost the reverse; tribes are community-based (e.g., the local community, their work community, etc.) and thus have a much lower barrier-to-entry. Because tribes are based around a community, people are more willing to interact and befriend new members joining that community. This comes with a cost of having to maintain relationships with toxic community members: the Airbnb experience host told a story of how there are some experience hosts that are members of the local Airbnb experience host community that are using the platform primarily to make money and often cut corners on integrity, which makes her upset. Yet, she was reluctant to confront them about their behavior because they are a community member. I'd also assume that Japanese have fewer best-friend relationships as the time invested into a best-friend relationship is likely instead invested into relationships within communities.

If the above is valid, it would suggest value in finding a balance. Americans could invest more deeply within their communities and taking a more people-oriented approach to travel and Japanese could invest more heavily into some deeper relationships and confront toxic community members. 

Does this ring true to you? Do you experience friendships and community differently? Do you have experience taking more people-oriented approaches to travel? I'd love to hear about it :)

On organizational longevity

Some of the most surprising things about Japan are the shops you stumble upon - you can find many businesses that have been open for hundreds of years. Most of these are not large companies, but rather the local town’s artisanal {insert product here}. We’ve encountered sake breweries, restaurants, tea makers, and many other craft businesses that have been open well before World War Two, some before Commodore Perry ‘opened’ Japan to the West, and some even before the famous 47 ronin revolted. Insanely enough, one hotel has been running for over 1,300 years (before Constantine became the Catholic Pope)! These businesses have survived war, famine, modernization, and growth. What enables their longevity and what can modern-day businesses learn from them? 

This question has no doubt been asked and answered before. I am, hopefully, going to take a slightly different take - one based on my brief understanding of Japanese culture and my background in social impact. I believe there are three key takeaways:

• Strive for mastery - These businesses strive for perfection beyond their customers’ expectations. They are labors of love that respond to the needs of the community and even preempts their customers’ desires. This hyperfocus on details and perfection leads to deep trust with customers and, eventually, a tradition (and brand) of excellence. 

• Innovate responsibly - All of these businesses started somewhere and grew. Some grew more than others and some have grown and shrunk. But all grew carefully and with intention - they did not take outsized risks that jeopardized their core product or organizational foundation (e.g., a sake brewery that continues to make the local temples’ special sake and expanded to offer a suite of other sakes for the public or a factory that switched to making a different product but retained all of its highly skilled staff). 

• Invest in people - The foundation of these organizations are the staff. They almost all have low turnover rates and high tenure - many are even multi-generational family businesses (often with new leaders adopted into the family). The idea seems to be that as employees develop mastery (picture ‘Jiro Dreams of Sushi’ level mastery), they will ultimately be the vanguard of the future of the business - never losing sight of the core values and mastery vital to the identity and success of the organization.

In regard to social impact, I think the biggest lesson to pull from all of this is the scale of investment, especially the time investment. Responsible and effective change takes time - time for mastery to manifest into the community as trust and excellence, time for appropriate innovations to disrupt with intention and minimal detrimental impacts, and time for leaders to grow into their mastery to be able to continue to make change. Thus, organizations intent on longevity seeking to make change should either foster mastery internally (e.g., by focusing long-term on a few causes/locations and retaining institutional knowledge) or support other organizations in fostering their mastery (e.g., with long term partnerships and support). 

All this being said, I don’t believe every organization should follow these tenants, as there will always be a need for the big and bold disruptors. Instead, I would guess that there likely is an ideal balance of both types of businesses in each sector. For example, I would guess that the food sector could benefit from more organizations centered on longevity than there are currently today given the state of our soil, diet, and environment. 

A critical component of inspiring more businesses to focus on longevity would be fixing incentives. Right now, there are very few incentives for for-profit businesses to focus on longevity and minimizing negative externalities over short term gains. I believe implementing something like Pigouvian taxes (e.g., a carbon tax) would help cause a huge shift in many organizations’ strategy towards a longevity focus [but this opens a whole can of worms on how to properly price negative externalities that I do not have the expertise or knowledge to begin to riff on here]. 

I should learn more in the coming weeks as I spend time in Kyoto, the place with the highest concentration of old businesses in Japan, but I wanted to document my current hypotheses. I’ll provide a followup if anything new arises and I would love to hear any reactions! 

Sleep vs. Survive

“Should we finish boiling water in the morning and go to sleep?” I asked Seb as Jordan and I huddled in the corner of the tent cold, damp, and exhausted. We had just finished an 11-hour trek up a mountain through a typhoon and snow, the latter of which caught us all by surprise, and pitched our tent precariously on the top of a ridge just below Yarigatake. We had spent the next three hours boiling snow but were still a couple liters away from refilling our water bottles. The idea of waking up at 4am to catch the sunrise was becoming increasingly daunting. 

“No,” Seb replied, “in the mountains it’s not about sleep but survival.” 

While Seb was jokingly highlighting the lack of sleep we were facing, I found his words to be a surprisingly interesting framework to consider - when is it time to sleep vs. when is it time to survive? In this general dichotomy, sleep represents a comfortable pace where you can fulfill your desires while also accomplishing your work (we’d fulfilled our goal of getting to the base of the summit of Yarigatake and could have gone to sleep) and survival represents a state of hardworking urgency where you sacrifice to accomplish more (doing all of the necessary preparations, like boiling the rest of the water, to hit the ground running tomorrow morning). 

Reflecting with this in mind, I realized that I could categorize most days as primarily ‘sleep’ or ‘survive’ days. Interestingly, I noticed that I didn’t find ‘survive’ days inherently difficult or less joyful than ‘sleep’ days (in fact some of my fondest memories are of ‘survive’ days) but the days that I do remember as taxing were unexpected ‘survive’ days and long periods of ‘survive’ or ‘sleep’ days. 

In thinking about how to minimize the number of unpleasant days, I found myself wondering about the ideal ‘sleep’/’survive’ day ratio. Personally, I think my ideal ratio is somewhere between 3:1 and 6:1 - I still enjoy burning the midnight oil to grind away at something a couple times a week but any more frequent than that and I start suffering in performance, mood, or a mixture or both. This has held up as I’m traveling, too - I found that I naturally have had about 1-2 full and fast-paced days a week. Looking forward, I’m hoping to prepare my itineraries with this ratio in mind to see if it helps me feel fulfilled without burning out. If you have used a similar framework, I’d love to hear about it! 

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Anecdote: A guide to probably the most awe-inspiring, beautiful, terrifying, challenging, and stunning outdoor adventure of my life (some pictures found here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sQBSJwqL7XqAfxWo9; https://photos.app.goo.gl/s9SQ4fSE6FLdiaxj6)

Monday

• 19:00 - typhoon begins

• 21:45 - meet Seb at the bus station

• 22:30 - take the night bus from Tokyo to Kamikochi

Tuesday

• 5:00 - arrive in Kamikochi (at ~1500m above sea level)

• 6:00 - store bags and begin hiking in the typhoon. See first glimpses of fall colors

• 10:30 - the rain stops

• 12:30 - encounter snow for the first time

• 13:30 - begin walking in ankle-deep (or deeper) snow

• 16:00 - get to the top of the ridge below Yarigatake (~3000m)

• 16:30 - finish setting up camp in the snow and begin boiling water

• 19:30 - take a break from boiling water to eat dinner and stare at the clear night sky (so many stars!)

• 21:00 - finish boiling water and go to sleep (read: shiver while desperately trying to rest)

Wednesday

• 4:30 - wake up and eat breakfast

• 5:15 - begin climbing up Yarigatake

• 5:50 - get to the top for a cloudless sunrise. See Mt. Fuji. Incredible. 

• 6:15 - begin climbing down Yarigatake

• 6:45 - return to camp

• 8730 - pack up camp and begin descent

• 15:00 - emerge back on the valley floor

• 16:00 - finish setting up camp

• 18:30 - go to sleep

Thursday

• 4:30 - wake up and eat breakfast

• 5:45 - finish packing up camp

• 6:00 - start hiking up Yakedake (active volcano)

• 8:45 - get told by mountain hut staff that they are taking away the bridge towards the start of the trail to close it for the winter at noon. Begin charging up the volcano

• 9:30 - get to the top of Yakedake just in time for the clouds to clear

• 9:40 - begin descending Yakedake

• 11:55 - finish the hike

• 15:15 - catch a bus back to civilization

On whales

Surreal and awesome aren't good enough words to describe the experience of being up close and personal to a whale underwater. They glide like UFOs, singing in a mysterious language, and barely registering your insignificant presence. How strange we humans must be to them - flailing awkwardly about in the water as they zoom by. I imagine we're like horseflies in molasses to them and their snorts make a lot more sense.

We were astonishingly lucky to see several humpbacks underwater off the coast of Mo’orea (shout-out to Nish's incredible video montage of our diving highlights, found below and here: https://vimeo.com/365614490).

One of my big bucket list items was to swim with something massive. I'm still not sure why. But those fleeting moments with the whales reminded me of several things. First, I got a sense similar to seeing Yosemite for the first time - just overwhelmed by the majestic grandeur of some of nature's finest creations. Then, fascination - we know next to nothing about these massive creatures. Finally, a grim sense of responsibility. We, the awkward horseflies splashing around, have changed the world so drastically that they, like most other ocean life, might not see the turn of the century (if we don't hunt them into extinction first). It cemented in my mind how terrifyingly complex and large both our planet and the herculean task of fixing it are (To perfectly fit this theme, my flight was almost cancelled due to the super-typhoon currently drenching Japan. I'm holed up in my hotel room writing this with bottled water and onigiri).

Jordan and I are looking into ways of minimizing and offsetting our carbon footprint as we travel. If you have any resources or ideas, please let us know. I'll also be making a future blog post about what methods we find along the way. Until then, and for many nights after, I'll be dreaming of the massive alien creatures we call whales.

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Also, by popular request, I'll be sending out email notifications when I add a new blog post. If you are interested in joining that list, please email me at connor.a.jordan@gmail.com indicating your interest. Thanks!

On making changes

When I first left work, I was surprised by how few steps there were to start traveling. At their most basic, they were:

1. Quit

2. Buy a one way ticket

3. Pack and board the plane

Obviously there are many more steps to doing this responsibly, mostly around planning and preparing for the journey (e.g., buying health and travel insurance, picking must-do experiences, moving items into storage, etc.) but to get started, all I really needed to do was the first one and I knew the rest would fall into place.

However, I realized there were two key steps (steps -1 and 0, if you will) that I needed to take before I left Redstone. To explain these steps, I first need to explain how I currently understand change. Change happens when resources, capacity, and motivation band together to overcome default state.

The default state is the expected status quo. My default state, at this point in my life as a young and inexperienced recent-college alumnus, is to work hard to start advancing in my career. This is the default state because, in all likelihood, I'll return to it when I come back from my travels. I view the default state similar to the bottom of a hill when rolling a rock up it. It takes energy to move the rock up and, eventually, the rock will have to come back down to its resting place. In this metaphor, pushing the rock requires the resources to push (e.g., food), capacity to push, and motivation to push. To define each in more detail:

• Resources are material possessions, and usually the most important among them is money. One of the key reasons I can travel is that I have no debt and I saved up enough to not have to work for an extended period of time.

• Capacity, at its most basic, is time. I needed the time to travel, which I obtained when I left Redstone.

• Motivation is trickier to explain. Right now, I define it as the desire and drive to overcome the challenges that entrench the default state. For me, most of these were internal barriers I made for myself, such as, "you can't quit because you need more experience to do what you want to do later in life", "you can't quit because you need to start saving to buy a house and support your family", or "you can't leave your friends because you'll be lonely and they'll find new ones." It was important to realize that all of these barriers are solvable but are not easy to solve, thus the drive to overcome these challenges is vital. Motivation has two components - internal and external. While internal motivation can be influenced by others and the world around you (the most classic example being peer pressure), I believe that internal motivation is more sustainable than external motivation because, at the end of the day, it is you who has to overcome the challenges. I think external motivators are most useful in getting started - there is nothing like peer accountability to make you take your first few steps.

Back to the point, I am privileged to have graduated without debt and to have found a fulfilling job right out of college that paid well enough for me to save enough to travel, completing step -1. However, finding the motivation to travel, step 0, was the hardest for me. I kept worrying about the opportunity costs of not working and leaving the familiar.

One of the key moments that solidified my decision to travel was when I developed a narrative hypothesis (or draft story) for why I wanted to travel that moved beyond “seeing the world.” Through exercises like odyssey planning, I explored different careers I thought I could be interested in when I return and identified how travel would benefit those careers. That reasoning in turn helped me define areas of interest and personal goals for the trip (which I described in my first blog post). It was only when I articulated these interests and goals that traveling felt less like an escape from professional life and more like a productive step forward in all facets of my life from personal to professional.

I'm very curious to see how defining and refining my personal narratives can help me make decisions moving forward and how my narrative hypothesis for my travels will evolve in the months to come.

Resource - Travel cost estimator/expenses tracker

I figured I’d start of strong with two posts - one meandering stream-of-consciousness and one potentially useful read.

To prepare for traveling, I spent a weekend creating a Travel cost estimator/expenses tracker, found here. Jordan and I used this to give us a rough sense of how far our money will go in each country and to have a system to track our expenses.

Screenshot of the Cost overview tab

This is how it works, by sheet:

• Cost overview: This is the high level estimate/expense tracker sheet that sum up total estimated costs for budget travel and total expenses in cells B5 and B7. To use it to estimate weekly costs, fill in country names in row 7 and price estimates will be automatically pulled from the Estimated daily costs sheet (see below for a description) and multiplied by 7. Also, add any large expenses like airfare or special guided experiences in column C starting at row 11 (Note: if you go below C16 you need to update the ‘Total Estimate’ cell in row B11 to include whatever additional cells you added). Finally, adjust the dates above the numbered weeks in row 5 as needed. To use it to track expenses, add expenses to the Expenses tab (detailed below).

• Expenses: Use this sheet to track your expenses. Fill in a type (Accommodation, Transportation, Food & Drink, or Other), the cost (e.g., 45), the name of the expense (e.g., Dinner at Sushi Yoshizumi), the date(s) that expense occurred on, the week number that expense should be appear in (e.g., week 1), and the conversion rate between the currency used and USD (e.g., 1 if spent using USD). The USD cost will automatically calculate. This will then be aggregated in the Cost overview tab.

• Estimated daily costs: This sheet aggregates daily cost information from several websites and averages them into an average estimated daily cost (column I). Feel free to add more to it to refine the estimate by inserting a column inbetween columns C and F (inserting a column outside of C and F will require you to update the calculation in column I) and adding additional daily cost estimates there. (Note: the averages estimates are applicable for a budget traveler. Prepare to spend significantly more than the estimate if you aren’t planning a shoestring budget trip)

This should hopefully help you forecast the cost of your travel. Feel free to ask any questions and let me know if you catch any bugs!

Stepping Into The Road - The journey begins

Every travel blog and instagram is awash in cheesy travel quotes (e.g., some form of “a boat is safe in a harbor but that’s not what boats are built for”) so, while this isn’t a journey of #selfdiscovery, I figured it is only appropriate to start my blog off with one of my favorite quotes that, quite fittingly, is a travel quote:

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” - Bilbo Baggins

I loved all things fantasy and sci-fi growing up but LotR holds a special place in my heart (Lord of the Rings, for my less fantasy savvy readers). One of the reasons why I find it such a compelling story, beyond the phenomenal world J.R.R. Tolkien invites us into, is that the main heroes are not suave, hyper-competent, and unstoppable adonises but unassuming hobbits, completely out of their element, who defeat evil through sacrifice, determination, and hiking (or it could be that the movies came out in my early teenage years and DAMN THEY ARE GOOD! Talk about an epic multi-hour New Zealand travel commercial!).

When I first read the books and watched the movies, my favorite character was Aragorn, son of Arathor, High King of Gondor and Arnor, and one of the biggest badasses in all of epic fantasy. But over time, as I’ve revisited Middle Earth, I’ve realized the character I aspire to be is Samwise (Sam) Gamgee - the unflinchingly loyal, brave, and determined best friend/lifeline of the main character, Frodo Baggins. Sam’s entire role is a supporting one, but it is only with his help that Frodo endures the trials and tribulations to destroy The One Ring and save Middle Earth.

It was in high school when it first clicked for me in that I felt the most fulfillment from supporting others. I look back fondly at the cross country team’s achievements and my small role in helping others realize their running potential. Mostly by random strokes of luck, I was fortunate enough to continue to help others through being a Resident Assistant, a Kitchen Manager, a Tour Guide, a Stapher (a summer camp counselor), and a friend through the turbulent times that are college. That luck continued to bring me to my first job after school at Redstone Strategy Group, a boutique non-profit consulting firm dedicated to helping foundations, non-profits, governments, and other impact oriented organizations solve the world’s most challenging social problems. I learned so much from all of my experiences but it was Redstone that provided me with some tactical approaches and skills to help others realize impact at scale to make the world a better place.

As a 24 year old, most of my decisions been the results of stepping into a new space (or road, to link this metaphor to the quote above), being swept off my feet, and letting the river of time take me to interesting and valuable opportunities. However, as I’ve become increasingly aware of the existential crises facing our planet, I want to step into a new road, one that helps me better understand the people facing and making these crises so that I can try to determine how best I can help make a difference. And it is with that theme that I’ve decided to travel around the world with Jordan. I have three key goals for this trip:

• Better understand the people facing and creating the world’s most challenging social problems: For one of the first times in human history, we are facing species-wide threats that require all of us to change our behavior like climate change, antibiotic resistance, and the extinction of both diverse species and cultures. For some, the impact will be felt in the decades to come and for others, the acute effects are already impacting their daily lives. I hope to meet many people facing and creating these challenges so that I can better understand how to help make an impact.

• Develop my impact hypothesis: In the social impact sector, good strategy relies on having a hypothesis about how the world works and how it would respond to a particular intervention (this is known by many names but is most commonly called a “Theory of Change”). I hope to develop an impact hypothesis to help guide my work moving forward. Currently, I have a suspicion that resilient communities will be vital for the future. There is probably a size at which humans can live most sustainably, creating and sharing resources efficiently and effectively using systems like sharing economies, microgrids, hydroponics, and creative urban planning. However, infrastructure to connect these communities together must also exist to preserve and celebrate the uniqueness of others and our environments. I’m looking forward to learning about communities around the world and how they balance their local community with the global community.

• Have time- and energy-expensive experiences: I know that as I grow older I’ll start to have more ties to specific locations like a home or pets or children, my body will prevent me from being quite as bold as I am now, and I’ll be spending more time on my career. The combination of these three factors means that, while I might have more money to travel later in life, I will certainly have less time and energy. I hope to have experiences that are time- and energy-expensive and are unique to this moment in my life like taking a month to learn how to mountaineer in Nepal (shoutout to Tashi!).

It is with these three goals, a 40L backpack, a lightweight small duffel, and Jordan that I begin my travels. I’m looking forward to meeting new friends, learning as much as I can, overcoming challenges, and having unique experiences. And who knows, maybe there will be some #selfdiscovery along the way, too. I’m excited for wherever I’ll be swept off to next.

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I’ll be trying to consistently update a blog with some streams-of-consciousness (like this post), insights, useful tips, and general musings at connorajordan.com. You can find pictures of our journey @twoflannels_onetrip. Also, we would love to see you out on the road so please see our frequently updated tentative itinerary here and ping us if you would like to meet up. Finally, we would also appreciate any recommendations on things to do, places to go, and people to meet.